Andrián Pertout speaks to legendary
songwriter and musician Janis Ian from Nashville about her beginnings,
songwriting craft, and her new album ‘God and the FBI’.

Janis Ian burst into the music scene with a bang
in the late sixties with controversial song ‘Society’s Child’ – a tune
with a message, essentially questioning the social forces of the time standing
firm against the love between a white teenage girl and a black teenage
boy. It was quickly banned from the airwaves, but nevertheless still
became a nationwide hit in 1967. The seventies then delivered ‘Jesse’
and ‘At Seventeen’, out on ‘Stars’ (1973) and ‘Between the Lines’ (1975)
– the latter incidentally selling over a million copies and producing two
Grammies, although it was the following album ‘Aftertones’ (1976) that
truly established her as an international star. With the eighties
then came disco dance floor classic ‘Fly Too High’, highlighted on the
soundtrack of the Jodie Foster movie ‘Foxes.’ Beyond the nineties
Janis Ian is now credited with a collection of seventeen solo albums and
collaborations with Chick Corea, Giorgio Moroder, Mel Torme, Leonard Cohen
and James Brown. Her songs have also been recorded by the likes of
Stan Getz, Bette Midler, Amy Grant, John Cougar Mellancamp, Glen Campbell,
Vanilla Fudge, Joan Baez, Etta James, Cher and Hugh Masekela, among many.
Adding to this are many side projects that include numerous soundtrack
scores over the years and an ongoing monthly contribution to ‘Performing
Songwriter’ magazine. Her latest Windham Hill release is titled ‘God
and the FBI’, and features Janis Ian on guitar, bass, keyboards and vocals
along with multi-instrumentalists Philip Clark, Jim Cregan and Marc Moreau,
as well as the guest list of Willie Nelson, Chet Atkins, Steve Gadd, Willie
Weeks and Matt Rollins.

How would you describe the mood at the time of
the release of your controversial song ‘Society’s Child’?

JI: ”In the States?”

Yes…

JI: “It was a mood of change. I mean,
the whole country was changing. And the song was just part of that.”

I guess I’m referring to the fact that the music
scene has changed a lot since then, and that everybody has this feeling
that music in the 60s was not as commercialised as it is now…

JI: “But it was really commercial.
I think in a lot of ways it was more commercial than it is now. There
wasn’t as much in the way of exposure. You know, you just had Life,
Look, Times and Newsweek. You didn’t have eight hundred different
magazines – you certainly didn’t have music magazines in this country.
The only ones that we had were – really Crawdaddy was the first one, and
then Rolling Stone. But if you look at the stuff in the United States
like with what was going on at the time, just before the Beatles and Bob
Dylan, every singer out there was manufactured. And this refers to
Frankie Avalon and Fabian.”

Was the controversy behind the song natural or
preconceived?

JI: ”I think it was just natural. It was
what I was seeing going on around me. And it was something that my
friends were talking about and I was talking about. And I was concerned
with that.”

Tell me about being thought of as a has-been at
eighteen – that’s quite sad really. Did the imminent success of ‘Jesse’
in the 70s mean a lot to you personally, or was chart success unimportant
to you at the time?

JI: ”It’s important in terms of – chart success
allows you a luxury to buy the time to continue doing your work.”

But what was the driving force for you really?
Did you have your eye on the charts all the time?

JI: ”No, I never even thought about that.
I’ve just always been real lucky that when I have had success, it’s always
been with something that I wrote that I really liked. You know, I
listen to the charts, and I guess I heard them then. I have a pretty
adept memory for music, so whatever goes in stays there, but I still don’t
worry about it.”

When did you actually start writing songs?

JI: ”I was twelve; it was ’63.”

And what made you want to write songs?

JI: ”I have no idea. I always wrote poetry
and stuff. And I guess it just came naturally. I don’t know…
I listened to other records and noticed that some of them were writing
their own stuff, so it was logical that at twelve I’d figure I could do
that too (laughs). That’s why I think it’s great when people start
young – when you start playing young especially, because there are no bars
at that age.”

I guess you are just following your own instincts…

JI: ”Yeah. And that’s great for a long time.
It took me decades to get to Nashville, and then wrote enough with other
writers to realize how little craft I had, which was a pretty important
thing for me. And it’s great now, I’m a much better writer, because
now I do have craft as well as instincts.”

What are your thoughts on craft?

JI: ”Part if it comes with time and part of it
also comes with being smart about it – looking at your own work, not being
afraid to criticize it, or to throw things out of it. Learning not
to fall in love with how wonderful you are. Learning that different
songs do different things. Like there are songs like ‘At Seventeen’
where you learn that you really have to be universal as possible to make
your point. There are other songs where you don’t have to; people
still feel something from them. If you can hit both; if you can hit
the universal as well as the truthful, then that’s the best, because then
you cover everything.”

Stan Getz, Bette Midler, Amy Grant, John Cougar
Mellancamp, Glen Campbell, Vanilla Fudge, Joan Baez, Etta James, Cher and
Hugh Masekela, among many. Now that’s an impressive list of people
having recorded your songs? How do you approach songwriting?

JI: “Boy! In what sense?”

How has the process of songwriting developed or
changed over the years for you?

JI: ”I guess as you get older, and you hopefully
become a better writer, time collapses. You take a lot less time
with everything you do. ‘Cause you already know so many dead-ends,
that you don’t have to go down again. You’re sure that they don’t
work. You get more sure of yourself, especially with some success.
And the sureness allows you to experiment more. Like, with this album
I knew that it was very possibly my last shot, so why not go into a house
with Pro Tools and three other people, and just live there and record for
three months. You know, I don’t know that I would have had the balls
to do that fifteen years ago, or to use the technology that really hadn’t
been used in that way.”

And is it something that you plan? Like
business, where you think, ‘I better write some music today.’

JI: ”No. I do a lot of co-writing, and when
you’re co-writing you do think, ‘OK, I’m working with someone today.
Let me get my act together, see if I’ve got some stuff ready,’ and, ‘Let’s
try and get something done, even if it’s just combined.’ And that
kind of keeps me on my toes. Down here they talk about keeping your
motor oil, keeping it oiled enough so that when you have inspiration; you’re
ready to write. And I find that’s real important. When I was
young I wrote a lot more, but I threw away a lot, and now there’s very
little that gets thrown away. But I write less.”

Do you finish everything you start?

JI: ”…Or I stop before I really invest much time
in it. And again that’s part of the learning curve I think, in any
profession.”

What brought about your change of direction in
the early 80s, and the initiation of your studies with Stella Adler?
What were your aspirations at the time?

JI: ”I really wanted to get away from doing music
full time and do something else that was in the arts but where I wouldn’t
have to be good at it. So I studied acting and ballet, directing,
and a bunch of other things. But it was more with the intention of
just rounding myself out some. And what happens of course is that
any time that you start studying anything that you get passionate about,
it ends up inspiring you.”

Did the realization eventually come to you that
your strengths were really in writing or has it always been important for
you to do lots of different things?

JI: ”Well, for some reason I usually end up being
spread very thin. Like this month I’ve gotta get a two-part article
into Performing Songwriter magazine. I’m working on a story with
a science fiction writer named Mike Resnick that I’ve gotta get done.
He’s a pretty well know writer. I’m reviewing a couple of scripts
for a film project. It’s a Broadway project. I’ve got about
eight writing appointments, and I’ve gotta pack for Australia, to figure
out what to do about my laundry (laughs). So I stay fairly busy.”

How has the recent deal with Windham Hill Records
influenced your musical career?

JI: ”They’ve been great. You know, it’s
amazing to me because they basically give us a budget and then leave us
alone. And that’s pretty extraordinary for a record company, they
just don’t do that.”

So there’s no influence on direction?

JI: ”No, it might be nice to have a little more
direction (chuckles). But right now it’s, ‘Go and make the best album
you can possibly make. And see you in three months.’ It’s a
really rare piece of luck for somebody, particularly somebody my age, in
my business. They just don’t do that anymore.”

What is the theme of your latest album ‘God &
the FBI’?

JI: ”I don’t know that it has a theme. The
main song is about my family’s experiences with the FBI, and FBI surveillance…”

Could you tell us about that?

JI: ”Yeah, except that we’d start to get into
a time problem in five minutes, so we’ll do that in three minutes.
It was just that my parents were pretty liberal and I guess they went to
the wrong meeting. My dad went to a meeting of chicken farmers, and
he got picked up by the FBI after. And they interrogated him, and
then I guess they went on a watch list. So for most of my life, until
I was sixteen or seventeen, they were always around.”

And how does God come into it?

JI: ”I couldn’t think of anything that’s more
powerful than what they would have felt.”

And the other tracks on the album?

JI: ”From ’Days like These,’ which is a ballad
to ‘On the Other Side’, which is a look at what the world looks like after
you’re dead, to a funny song called ‘Boots Like Emmy Lou’s’, which is about
Emmy Lou Harris, and her boots. All kinds of stuff.”

Tell me about some of the music that you will
be showcasing during your upcoming Australian tour.

JI: ”We’ll be doing stuff like ‘At Seventeen’,
because I think that that’s only fair. But we also do a lot of technology
in our show. It looks like ‘girl with guitar’ when I walk out, but
from the first note, it’s not ‘girl with guitar’, it’s ‘girl with guitar’
and three jam men in it. A Digitech vocalist, Mackie board and a
couple of samplers. We do a lot of live sampling on the show, a lot
of stuff on the fly. So it’s a little bit more interesting I think
than most of the singer songwriter shows…”